Communism, kidnapping and the KKK: New book tells obscure history of the Princeton miners' strike

Today Princeton is a quiet community in southern B.C. where a few thousand people live.

But in the early 1930s the small town was the epicentre of anti-communist hysteria, where police clashed with miners and their families, and the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses and made threats.

This tumultuous and largely unknown period of B.C.'s history, which began with a miners' strike, is detailed in Soviet Princeton: Slim Evans and the 1932/33 Miner's Strike by cultural historians Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat.

"It's astonishing how thick the story is," said Bartlett, who lives in Princeton and, along with Ruebsaat, researches early songs and poems and performs them as well.

Bartlett and Ruebsaat launched the book at St. James Hall in Vancouver on Nov. 22, and they will also discuss their book at the Princeton Museum on Nov. 24.

The spark: a miners' strike

Bartlett said the chaos was born out of a time when many in Canada were unemployed.

"It's 1932, the depth of the Depression, and hundreds of thousands of Canadians are unemployed, racing from one end of the country to the other, riding boxcars, looking for jobs," he said.

The strike broke out a coal mine in Princeton after the managers cut back wages by 10 per cent and promised to raise it back, but reneged on the commitment.

"Somebody there obviously connected to some kind of union, had a union connection, sent for an organizer from the Workers' Unity League, an outfit fairly closely connected to the progressive elements in the Communist Party," Bartlett said.

Anti-communist panic

That's when Arthur 'Slim' Evans arrived — a Toronto-born leader in the industrial labour union movement in the U.S. who had returned to Canada.

His efforts in organizing a successful strike sent the editor of the local newspaper, who was obsessed with keeping out communism, into a "tailspin."

"The interesting thing about this strike is it kind of encapsulates the tenor of the times of the thirties. You've got union organization, and at the same time you've got thousands of people unemployed, and of course the climax of all this is the On to Ottawa [Trek]," said Ruebsaat.

"Princeton was a dress rehearsal for all of that stuff, and it incorporated baton charges with policeman against unarmed not just strikers but their families…. All of these things are mixed together in this Depression soup."

Bartlett said he was surprised that these events are "not told in any of the records of histories" he's come across, especially considering what happened — such as Slim Evans being kidnapped by a gang led by the president of the local board of trade and being put on a train to Vancouver.

The tireless Evans got off in Mission, and hopped on a train right back to Princeton.

To hear the full interview listen to the audio labelled: New book tells obscure history of violent miners' strike in Princeton in 1930s